


Origin Story

by psocoptera



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Angst, Bender/Non-bender Relations, Disability, Gen, Giant Statue of Toph Bei Fong, Motherhood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-20
Updated: 2012-06-20
Packaged: 2017-11-08 03:51:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/438839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psocoptera/pseuds/psocoptera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>SPOILERS for episode 1x10.  Lin, at her mother's feet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Origin Story

They dump Lin in front of headquarters, at her mother's feet.

She's very tall. Very far away.

Lin reaches up a hand. Once she'd have been able to fling herself up there. Once her mother would have bent to pick her up.

But now her mother is gone.

***

There are plumes of smoke in the sky.

***

Lin opens her eyes. She doesn't remember closing them. She remembers her mother, tying the sash around her eyes. "Your feet can see," she tells her. Lin tries to tap the ground with her toes, but she's wearing her boots.

***

The stone is cold under her head. She wants to roll away from it, but she can't take her eyes off her mother.

***

She remembers how her mother could make statues dance, how she could bring a long-ago battle to life with a box of terracotta soldiers. If her mother were here her mother could bend to pick her up. Her mother could rock her and she could lie cradled in the crook of her arm.

If the bloodbender were here he could work her arms and legs like one of her mother's statues. He could march her inside, or away.

She can't remember how to stand up.

***

She needs to sit up. She's too vulnerable lying here. She's hollow like a terracotta figurine, one good stomp could crush her. She needs to sit up before someone steps on her and shatters her into fragments.

But she can't hear any footsteps and there are no shadows passing by. The street is strangely empty, now she thinks of it, just her and her mother and the drifting smoke.

***

Statues aren't supposed to know they're hollow. Her mother never knew the light and never minded the darkness. She can be one more soldier in a city of soldiers, all alike.

She worries that the box of the city has tipped over, and somewhere behind her, all the little soldiers are lying spilled out in the streets.

***

When her mother walks, the earth shakes, but Lin can't step hard enough. "I'm sorry, Mama," she tells her, "I can't do it."

Her mother bends and picks her up. "You are my daughter," she says, rocking her. "Your heart is a mountain. Your fist is a boulder." She kisses her chubby fist. "Your blood is stone."

Lin has never understood why people say that stone is heavy. Her arms and legs are stone. She can't lift them.

***

Metal glitters like the sky full of stars. Metal whips faster than any snake. She had been the one to fold her mother's hands, when they were stiff and still and would never live again.

***

Twenty years ago she might have told herself that it was fate, that emptied, she could be filled, could become a vessel hollow enough to hold the whole future of a nation. She remembers racing Tenzin through the city, swooping in long wild arcs, him a rush of air just behind, just ahead of her. She had leaned into the wind and kissed him, had snaked metal up his wrists and arms and bit his lip when he blushed.

But she's no Pema, to wrap herself in red and saffron and make herself a box for Tenzin's soldiers. A mould for his clay. There is a strength in it, but not her strength. Her children would have known the earth, like her mother before her. And so she has none. Only her officers.

Can they all be tumbled down? Was she the last? She needs to get up. She needs to see if anyone, anyone in her whole city, is left standing.

***

It would be so easy, flying along her wires. It's so impossible, the weight of her spools pinning her shoulders to the ground.

***

Uncle Sokka never seemed hollow. She can pretend she's Uncle Sokka. She can pretend the earth never shook with the force of her stride.

Groaning, she pushes herself away from the quiet stone until she's sitting up. Everything swims around her for a moment, the whole familiar solidity of the city turned to alien water. She blinks and her eyes refocus. Her mother is still very tall and far away.

***

Her armor is very stiff and very heavy. She feels like she's trapped inside a statue. Its limbs are forged around her limbs and its belly holds her belly. Its throat is tight around her throat. She can't breathe; she claws at her armor. She can't get it off. She can't take it off. It won't come off. She scrabbles at it until her fingertips start to shred, and then stops, collapsing.

She is a small child, weeping, trapped helplessly inside her own clothes.

Her mother does not bend to pick her up.

***

Metal dances in her mother's hands, but not in hers.

"I'm sorry," she tells her mother, "I'm failing you."

"Never," her mother tells her.

***

Slowly, her breathing calms. There is no fleeing, no dodging. She will face this head-on like her mother taught her. She has that much left, at least.

Her armor is metal, and won't answer her. But she still knows every plate and joint of it like she knows the streets of her city. Her mother could walk in shoes when she had to, navigating by memory; Uncle Sokka could make swords without ever feeling the glitter in the ore.

She finds an edge and starts, with agonizing slowness, to peel. The metal plates resist, biting into her fingers; they fold and crack and cut into her skin. But she is strong, and she knows where her armor is weak, and piece by piece, she breaks out of it, piece by piece she sheds it like a shell, until she sits light and newborn at her mother's feet.

***

She will get up. She'll see if anyone is left in her city, if anyone needs a firm voice or steady hands. She'll right wobbled and toppled figurines until they stand neatly again.

And then she will find one of Uncle Sokka's swords. Uncle Zuko was as deadly with his swords as with his flames, she remembers, and Sokka even more so. Before she ever flew, she played with her almost-cousins, benders and non-benders meeting blade to blade. Her hand will remember how to fold around a handle, and if it does not, she will teach it again. 

She is Lin Beifong. Her heart is a mountain, her fist is a boulder, her blood is stone. And she does not need her bending to kill Amon.


End file.
